Scheduling a Dynamic Aircraft Repair Shop with Limited Repair Resources

Abstract

We address a dynamic repair shop scheduling problem in the context of military aircraft fleet management where the goal is to maintain a full complement of aircraft over the long-term. A number of flights, each with a requirement for a specific number and type of aircraft, are already scheduled over a long horizon. We need to assign aircraft to flights and schedule repair activities while considering the flights requirements, repair capacity, and aircraft failures. The number of aircraft awaiting repair dynamically changes over time due to failures and it is therefore necessary to rebuild the repair schedule online. To solve the problem, we view the dynamic repair shop as successive static repair scheduling sub-problems over shorter time periods. We propose a complete approach based on the logic-based Benders decomposition to solve the static sub-problems, and design different rescheduling policies to schedule the dynamic repair shop. Computational experiments demonstrate that the Benders model is able to find and prove optimal solutions on average four times faster than a mixed integer programming model. The rescheduling approach having both aspects of scheduling over a longer horizon and quickly adjusting the schedule increases aircraft available in the long term by 10% compared to the approaches having either one of the aspects alone

Scheduling an Aircraft Repair Shop

“…It is then executed as is, with no dynamic reaction to actual aircraft failures. We study dynamic re-scheduling in future work (Aramon Bajestani and Beck 2011). The flow of an aircraft during a single scheduling horizon is illustrated in Figure 1.…”

Logic-Based Benders Decomposition for Large-Scale Optimization

“…Branch and check is applied to a problem in the form (6). In all applications to date, the initial master problem min{ f (x) | C ′ (x), x ∈ D x } is a mixed integer/linear programming (MILP) problem that is solved by a branch-and-cut method.…”

“…LBBD applications to shop and factory scheduling include aircraft repair shop scheduling [6], job shop scheduling with human resurce constraints [51], permutation flowshop scheduling with time lags [52,53], one-machine scheduling problems [22,104,105], and flowshop planning and scheduling with deteriorating machines [7]. There is also an application to feature-based assembly planning [71].…”

A two-stage coupled algorithm for an integrated maintenance planning and flowshop scheduling problem with deteriorating machines

“…Although logicbased Benders decomposition has more flexibility in modeling the problems, there is no standard procedure to derive the Benders cuts, it is problem-specific and requires creative effort. Nonetheless it has been successfully applied to a number of combinatorial optimization problems, often reporting computational results that are several orders of magnitude better than the previous state-of-the-art (Hooker 2005(Hooker , 2007Beck 2010;Fazel-Zarandi and Beck 2011;Aramon Bajestani and Beck 2013).…”